Saturday, 24 January 2015

The recent events in Paris have stimulated a lot of discussion
regarding free speech in the press, blogs and across social networks and
the issue of whether free speech equals having the right to insult
others has been centre stage in discussion taking place in the UK. I
wanted to say a few words on the topic and look at comments that have
come from a number of Buddhist sources that I think are complicit in
calling for the suppression of free speech. It seems to me that a lot of
well-meaning folks are unable to distinguish between being nice and
being socially and politically irresponsible, demonstrating at times a
rather warped utopian view of the world which seems prevalent amongst
well-meaning western Buddhists and liberals. Some of what I write here
will be obvious to the politically informed reader, but I am writing it
nonetheless, because it turns out that a lot of folks just do not get
why a secular pluralistic society is so important and seem all to
willing to start giving up on freedom of speech.

I teach English in Italy and have spent the last week engaging
students in debate on free speech. I introduced the same questions with
high school teenagers, university students and adults, and there have
been consistent responses to the questions posed, which are more or less
as follow:

1. Do you think free speech is important? Why?

2. Should free speech ever be limited? Why?

3. Is it right to punish people for the things they say? Who should punish them?

4. Does free speech allow us to offend people? Why? Why not? Are there exceptions?

Societies necessarily need to establish shared ways of viewing and
conceptualising the world and of establishing the shared subjective
landscapes of individuals: a role that has historically been undertaken
most commonly by religion, more recently perhaps by capitalism,
materialism and the cult of the self. The same problem tends to emerge
from this shared human compulsion to establish familiar routes of
becoming. Modes of perception and being become frozen or normalised and
identities form around them into pre-given destinies, lines along which
individuals and groups are expected to travel. An alternative way of
conceiving of the world is potentially overtly relativistic and denies
any form of truth or the possibility of hierarchy. This is what Tom Pepper
would criticise as the failing of post-modernity. As individuals in the
West, we are to some degree left to choose: to bind our experience of
self to a belief system and ideology that we are attracted to, such as
Buddhism, or drift wherever the ideological currents of the dominant
society lead. In either case, the collective nature of self is often
ignored or under-appreciated.

Non-duality and problems in affirming our existence

When talking about non-duality these days, there are two primary
schools of thought that tend to dominate discussion: Buddhism and
Advaita. If we look at figures such as Nagarjuna, the originator of the Madhyamaka School
of Indian philosophy, non-duality is presented along the lines of
reductionism ad infinitum and the deconstruction of the self to its
empty conclusion. Hokai Sobol once explained that the Yogacara school
of Indian philosophy describes the experience of non-duality or
emptiness in the affirmative: an experience that is intimately bound
with compassion and the awareness of our co-arising existence or
entrapment. Paul Williams states much the same in his textbook on the
doctrinal foundations of Mahayana Buddhism whilst observing how early
scripture of the Yogacara emerge specifically in the context of first
person meditation practice, rather than philosophical argumentation. It
seems inevitable that once we work out what we are not, we are left to
ask ourselves what remains, and consider how our view of what remains
determines to a great deal how we build community and establish values,
and in the Buddhist context, how meditative and ethical practices are
constructed. What a person remains as once
non-duality has been meaningfully confronted and the false
identification with an atomistic self has been discarded requires
pragmatic formulation. Not wanting to remain within a reflection on this
topic from a strictly Buddhist perspective, and with a desire to open
up the discussion so that it isn’t imprisoned in Buddhist discourse and
therefore impoverished, I am motivated by the need to build descriptions
of the individual and shared subjective experience of living
non-duality as a matter of fact. I think the logic of no-self is
sufficient to be a matter of fact and that it does not need to remain a
Buddhist or spiritual idea. If we take it as a given that the individual
self is not self-existing, or a separate entity to be found somewhere,
then the question naturally emerges: what are we? It is inevitable that
we need find some sense of who or what we are; we are questioning,
self-reflective beings after all and in our shared existence, we need
shared ideas of who and what we are that can potentially reduce
ignorance, suffering and the continued pursuit of growth at the expense
of natural capital.

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About Me

I'm a Life Coach, Core Shamanic Counsellor and meditation teacher to boot. I also teach English in Trieste, Italy. I follow a non-traditional expression of Buddhism and also run occasional events over the border from Trieste in Slovenia on Shamanism. Email me if you're curious about any of these activities.

Benvenuti (welcome)

This blog started out as an experiment. It continues to be such to this day. The opinions you will find in these pages are my own, and like all material on this Earth, are subject to change due to that hidden factor of impermanence.

This blog started out as an experiment. Writing is an art and one which I am only now starting to develop any capacity in. All of my writing constitutes a learning process in the presentation of ideas, opinions and experience. I am no expert, but I am doing my best to develop and learn from each piece I publish.

This blog started out as an experiment. I've no idea where it will end up. I explore Buddhist and Shamanic themes in this blog. Both areas which interest a fairly small percentage of Western society. Therefore this blog is quite specialist. It goes one step further by not representing any particular tradition in either of these spiritual arenas, although I have grounding in two shamanic worlds; one a path, the other an approach to counselling. My experience of Buddhism is primarily within the Tibetan and Theravada traditions.